Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. As quaint and graceful as medieval guilds. Grouse feathers float away on the still lake. Summer and reeds; summer ...

As I have every year since 2014, in 2025 I set aside a couple of months to peruse the year’s books of poetry — at least those books I had on hand. In the past, I’ve titled my annual roundup — one ...

Illustration by Adriana Georgopulos. (Saul Willams photo by Walter McBride / Getty Images / Ntozake Shange photo by Daniel Zuchnik / WireImage) the greatest Americans have not been born yet they are ...

Poets have a way of incorporating other poets into their work. Our columnist approves. By Elisa Gabbert Elisa Gabbert’s collections of poetry and essays include, most recently, “Normal Distance” and ...

The great, early-twentieth-century Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy much preferred writing about a culture’s end-times rather than all of the times that came before. This was largely because he ...

WHETHER we are to regard history as an analysis of tendencies or as a biography of individuals is ultimately a question, not of absolute truth and falsehood, but of relative temperament. If the ...

Humans spend most of their waking hours playing with what novelist Rudyard Kipling called “the most powerful drug used by mankind”—words. In the laboratories of our minds, we sort, slice, and string ...

“The first is the voice of the poet talking to himself—or to nobody. The second is the voice of the poet addressing an audience, whether large or small. The third is the voice of the poet when he ...

If there is one pursuit in which rhythm, timing and tempo are more important than they are in golf, it has to be poetry. Yet in the rich history of golf literature, verse has long trailed prose in ...

Here are the year’s most notable collections of verse as chosen by our poetry columnist. Credit...Photo illustration by Sebastian Mast Supported by By Elisa Gabbert Elisa Gabbert’s collections of ...